Give football fanatics what they want

Football fanatics of all stripes agree: The NFL's RedZone channel - available to cable and satellite subscribers - is a runaway success.

Footage hops from game to game on Sundays in an attempt to broadcast every single touchdown, most of them live. It's a great example of the most prominent sports league delivering to its couch-bound fans exactly what they want. But fans are rarely satisfied for long and are guaranteed to return, demanding something else.

These days, the drumbeat is for a view of games that has long been made available only to the teams. In early November, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on the camera angles known as the "All 22," which show all of the players on the field for the entirety of each play.

"The All 22 gives the viewer a much more nuanced perspective of what is happening on the field," wrote former Denver Broncos' tight end Nate Jackson on the website Deadspin last week. "You see the reason why the quarterback did what he did, and not just what he did."

So why can't fans pay a fee to see an All-22 channel? According to the Wall Street Journal story, coaches and general managers don't think fans would handle the increased access to information responsibly and will turn up the heat on players and coaches for stuff that currently doesn't show up on game broadcasts. So the NFL refers to the footage as "proprietary coaching information."

That kind of thinking is in keeping with the misconception that the small club of billionaires who own NFL teams is responsible for the league's success when, of course, it's actually the money from fans who buy tickets, jerseys - and pay for TV subscriptions.

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